Hand and Arm

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on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm by wals and is filed under Lexicon.
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5 Responses to “Hand and Arm”

Hello! I noticed there a mistake in the Finnish data. In Finnish the word “käsi” means both hand and arm, thereby Finnish should be under category “identical”. There is also a word “käsivarsi” which means ‘arm’, but it is a compund from the word “käsi” and a word “varsi” which means ’stem’. The basic word “käsi” is in no way restricked in its meaning to hand or arm.

In modern Greek, it is the same word (χέρι, akin to ancient Greek χείρ as in chiropractor) that is used for both “hand” and “arm”. Now, a separate word for “arm” does exist (μπράτσο, from Italian “braccio”, akin to English “brace”) but nonetheless, χέρι can mean either hand or arm. In fact, misuse of hand in place of arm is a common mistake among Greek learners of English. So, I believe that modern Greek should be classified in the Identical category.